What You Need to Know About the Historic Paul McCartney-Nirvana Show

As you are almost certainly already aware, last night Sir Paul McCartney fronted a band comprised of drummer Dave Grohl, bassist Krist Novoselic, and guitarist Pat Smear — aka, everyone from Nirvana's final lineup aside from Kurt Cobain — at Madison Square Garden for the 12-12-12 concert benefiting victims of superstorm Sandy. According to his introduction to their performance, he wasn't quite aware of the historic quality of the collaboration, but the rest of the rock world certainly was. (Many were displeased, including, almost inevitably, Courtney Love.)

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Instead of going the easy route and picking any number of songs from their formidable combined back-catalogues, which would surely have blown the minds of rock fans around the world, Maccavana (as I've taken to calling the assemblage) came up with a new jam for the occasion. It's called "Cut Me Some Slack," and it fully lives up to McCartney's pre-show promise that the collaboration had produced a "Helter Skelter"-style burner.

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For anyone who spent their high-school years worshipping Nirvana and Kurt Cobain, the moment produced a potent blend of nostalgia, pride, and maybe a twinge of heartache. Everyone else could simply enjoy the spectacle of the guy from the most iconic band of the 1960s fronting the most iconic band of the 1990s, which in and of itself is pretty seriously cool. But like so many things, there was more going on onstage than many people were aware of. Such as:

This isn't Sir Paul's first swing at alternative rock.

In 1993, McCartney started collaborating with producer and former Killing Joke bassist Martin "Youth" Glover on a project called the Fireman. The pair started out making ambient electronic music, one of McCartney's more unexpected musical interests, but, following Macca's acrimonious divorce from Heather Mills, they recorded a blistering rock record called Electric Arguments. Written and recorded in just under two weeks, the album gave McCartney a chance to air out his post-breakup issues amid a copious amount of grungy guitar distortion that's more In Utero than White Album.

This isn't the first time Nirvana's backed up a singer post-Cobain.

Toward the end of his life, Kurt Cobain befriended Simon Fair Timony, the young then-stepson of Jad Fair, an outsider-y underground pop musician whose band, Half Japanese, Cobain worshipped. In 1994, Timony played a short set at the Olympia, Washington, indie rock festival Yo Yo a Go Go with his group, the Stinky Puffs, who for that one performance included Grohl on drums and Novoselic on bass. They ended their set with "I'll Love You Anyway," Timony's heartbreakingly sincere goodbye note to his rock-star buddy.

Sir Paul and Pat Smear share some weird history.

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Long before Pat Smear joined Nirvana, he played in the Germs, probably the most important of the first wave of L.A. punk bands that sprang up in the late '70s. The group's frontman, Darby Crash, had genius-level talent and an almost frightening charisma with the potential to turn fans into something more like cult members, and he knew it. On December 7, 1980, Crash committed suicide by heroin overdose at age twenty-two, confident that the grand final gesture and his extant body of recorded work would propel him to posthumous superstardom. Unfortunately for Crash, John Lennon was murdered the following day, dominating the attention of the media and impressionable young rock fans he was hoping to capture.

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That weird instrument Sir Paul was playing is a cigar box guitar.

The cigar box guitar, a rudimentary approximation of a guitar that's frequently made using an actual cigar box as a body, was invented during the Civil War era and was popular during the Great Depression, but fell into near-terminal obscurity before being rescued in recent years by hobbyists who were drawn to how easy it is to build and how quirkily cool the finished product is. McCartney played a fairly deluxe model: a Resofiddle designed by LA-based cigar box guitar builder Matty Baratto, with built-in resonators to provide it with a bigger sound. (He's also been known to bust out a ukulele to play George Harrison's "Something" in tribute to the late Beatle guitarist, who was apparently crazy for the uke.)

This isn't the most insane impromptu jam session Macca's been involved in.

After the Beatles finally called it quits in 1970, McCartney and Lennon had a fairly public falling out that included the exchange of a number of pointed diss tracks from both Paul and John. But despite the public feuding, the two remained friends off and on until Lennon's death. They even made some post-Beatles music together, or at least they tried to. In 1974, during Lennon's notorious "lost weekend" in Los Angeles, the pair booked an impromptu session at Burbank Studios, and brought along Stevie Wonder for good measure. Unfortunately, some or all of the members were wasted off their asses, and the recording — which has been passed around as a bootleg aptly titled A Toot and a Snore in '74 — largely consists of a seemingly coked-up Lennon babbling into a microphone in between abortive attempts at covering a selection of rock-'n'-roll standards.

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Miles Raymer is a music writer based in New York City who has contributed to the Chicago Reader, Vice, Pitchfork, and others.